Sadie Belphi (Princess Pessimism)’s Reviews > The trouble with lichen > Status Update

Not Diana dropping a slur in the middle of her feminist monologue!

"Watch for the diddles, darling." has the same energy as "Insist upon your cup of stars"

"‘I’m not at all sure that I do want to raise a family,’ Diana told her. ‘There are so many families already.’"

Ahhhhhhhhh oh my god rip Diana's mother

" It turned out to be far from the straightforward choice, to speak, or not to speak, that it had appeared. She began to have a much clearer understanding of the dilemma that Francis must have reached months before. But she would not let it be a sympathetic understanding; instead, it was a challenge: if he could not solve it, she would …."

" Even back in her schooldays Diana had accepted as an article of faith the proposition that knowledge was no less a gift of God than life itself; from which it followed that the suppression of knowledge was a sin against the light. She would no longer have used such terms to express herself, but the sense of them held firm."

" She found herself able to stand back a little so that the trees merged into a wood, and a pretty ominous-looking wood it came to seem."

" However improbable, it was not a confirmed impossibility. For good order, if for no other reason, it deserved a further test … and then another … and another …"

" not an ordinary temptation for it had none of the flavour of temptation, nor any prospect of gain, but something more like curiosity raised to a compulsion. And in the end it won."

"‘Yes,’ agreed Zephanie, ‘but he does talk about her now, and that’s much better. He likes to talk about her, even if it does make him sad. But he spends an awful lot of time just sitting and thinking, and not looking sad at all. More like somebody working out sums.’"

" For a fortnight, or more, he roamed the place like the inversion of a ghost – his body present, but his spirit elsewhere."